As promised, here’s some more info on the red wire visible in Dom’s video from last week.

When we first got the boards back from the factory, the core power supply for the SoC wasn’t working; this 1.2V supply drives all of the core logic in the device, and is generated directly from the 5V input via an integrated switch-mode power supply. A bit more investigation revealed that the 19.2MHz system clock wasn’t running, and after a bit of digging around we found that this was because its power supply balls weren’t connected to the system 1.8V supply. The red wire is there to bring in power to these balls.

The mistake turns out to have been in the original schematics for the board, rather than in the translation to the PCB. At several points in the schematics we have structures that look a bit like this:

Here, the SDC_VDD rail is generated by an on-chip LDO, decoupled by three external capacitors, and then pushed back into four balls. The offending bit of the schematic looks like this:

At first glance, this looks like the same structure, but in fact all eight pins are inputs, and the SDRAM_1V8 rail, which should be tied to the system 1.8V supply, ends up floating. Fortunately a small change to the PCB layout fixes this problem; the other beta boards have been fixed by carefully removing an area of solder mask and applying a blob of solder.

Thanks to Paul Grant at Broadcom for his help in tracking this one down.

It’s so easy you wouldn’t believe it – all that we had to do was scratch a path of under a mm between two tracks on the top of the board and add a tiny dot of solder. The schematics have already been changed, so the problem won’t appear in any future PCBs, and we actually had pretty good fun doing the fix the other day! I’ve got some video of said fix in action which still needs editing (the family keeps shouting at me every time I open the computer, it being Christmas and all) which should go up soon.

This was, I’m very pleased to say, the only hardware bug on the board.

Thanks for sharing the info Eben. The HW guys here that have been through things like this love to know the details! Isn’t it fun bringing up a new board like this! Very exciting. I assume all the board go through ATE or will for the 10,000 anyway. Do all the boards get system tested as well? At least for a few seconds? Just wondering. Best Regards BTW for a Happy New Year for you and Liz and your family.

There’s not an enormous amount of scope for automated testing at the system level (most wires just go from an SoC to the edge of the board). We’ve budgeted 2-3 minutes of manual functional test for each board to check various interfaces are basically intact.

Wow, you were lucky to have been able to fix the problem without re-spin. It could easily have been under the SoC in which case you would have been SOL,

I remember the first run of a board with a BGA where we forgot to connect to a ball: it had to be pulled up instead of left floating. Fortunately the ball was on the edge of the BGA so it was possible to solder a red wire to it by pressing the wire against the ball and heating up the wire with a soldering iron. That was in the “good old days” of 50 mil ball pitch.

Hey, as long as you’re doing a PCB re-spin anyway, I’m going to repeat a minor request I made earlier. The traces connecting to power input S1 have nice vias going through the board. Those would be a great place to connect for an alternate 5V power input. Can you clear the solder mask from around those vias so the holes aren’t filled with solder mask? I’d also recommend moving the trace connected to S1 pin 1 away from S1 so there’s no chance of shorting to S1 pins 2-4.

I never trust schematics. When I was doing PC board design, I always produced a textual netlist with nets sorted by net name and pin within the net. Then I painstakingly checked the printed netlist against the schematics to make sure everything that looked connected on the schematic really was, especially making sure every power and ground was hooked up to the correct signal and not a pseudonym.

I usually found at least one problem that way. Plus, my sorting program resulted in a canonical netlist so you could tell the differences between board revisions using diff.

Amazingly enough, we do that too! (As Eben notes, this slipped through because the structure looks very similar to another structure.) We’ve folders upon folders of printed materials which were checked by more the one person against the schematics; this is just part of the long design process. That thoroughness is probably why there was only one hardware bug in the whole of this very complicated board.

I would like to add my thanks to Paul Grant at Broadcom for his help in tracking this one down. Great Support at this time of year and a very good spot, the kind of error you can spend ages not seeing?

Those certificates aren’t mandatory for dev boards, which is what this is. (Your Arduino doesn’t have those certificates either.) When we sell a cased version to schools, that will have to be certified.

On your other point, I think Eben is basically incapable of expressing things like this in layman’s terms; that’s what I’m here for. In short, the power didn’t work because two tracks in the PCB (printed circuit board) which were meant to be joined together were not joined together. Now they are, and everything works again.

Thats Understandable :) maybe some contest on case design? I belive that in R-PI fans community are some talented 3-D designers which can create some nice case projects (notning fancy but maybe little bit more than standard cuboid with few I/O holes). Logo competition gives great results!

The Gertboard will follow a few weeks later. It was always one generation behind the Raspi boards. I also do not want to spend the money for a 5 day PCB turn-around time. (Don’t forget it is not paid for by the Raspberry-Pi foundation, it is all paid for privately)

I’m guessing the error wasn’t present on the Alpha boards because it is related to the power supply which was changed after Alpha? It probably also helped track down the bug because you knew it wasn’t present on the Alphas.

Is it possible to buy one of these prototypes ? I am able to modify the hardware based on the problem description . Could these defective boards be made available to enthusiastic hackes with no warranty etc.
Thanks

early next year? no release date?
when I made my statement I was insulted by you guys – especially by liz.
I am still willing to help.
my suggestion: shop will openJuly 1, 2012
price will be 40 and 60 USD.

From the outside, it looks like there are still a few issues left before they can get the factory churning out assembled boards. They have a strict no pre-orders policy, due to a rare condition called “common sense”.

They have fixed the board design, but I’m not sure they have tested it. Back before boards were designed on the computer, every change, no matter how minor, had to be built and tested to make sure that there were no stray cat hairs on the master image. In these modern times, every change, no matter how minor, has to be tested, to make sure a cat didn’t walk across the keyboard, and change an unrelated part of the design. These tests also detect a whole class of human errors.

There was also a problem with volume ordering of a suitable SD card socket.

Once they have the right parts in hand, and everything is retested to make sure it all really works together, they will have to program the pick and place robot to assemble the parts it can assemble. Then they need to train the humans to assemble the remaining parts. Then they need to train the humans to test the final assembly. (There will be much sadness, and delay, if testing detects any systematic problems.)

Then they have to negotiate a schedule with the factory to make the boards.

Then they will sell the first 10k boards. We will each attempt to buy a board. A few of us will succeed and report that it was a generally wonderful experience.

They will sell many more batches, and by February or March, supply will catch up with demand. Adventuresome teachers will be able to get enough boards together, so they can use them to teach classes.

Then they can tweak the board to put in mounting holes, additional GPIO, line up the connectors, and address any additional issues that have come to light.

Over the same period, the community will be spewing out software, tutorials, howtos, and other such support stuff, so the boards will be ready for a much larger crop of teachers to use to teach students.

That’s how I think it will probably go, but I am most certainly not a spokesbeing for the R-Pi foundation.

Are there any POE to Std ethernet + 5V modules?
At the chip level I looked at some Maxim, TI & Lineaar Technology IEEE 802.3af standard PD front end chips but they all seem to need lots of other external components and some other chips!
Am I looking at the right things?

Google for ‘PoE module’; the first page gives plenty of sources. After 5 minutes of extensive literature review(!), PD solutions seem quite simple so long as you are not going to try to redesign the r-pi mainboard to keep it all on a single board, and you can cope with the potential thermal issues.

When can I get my hands on one of these? I have a fairly tech illiterate roommate who loves Linux ( I know it’s bad) and I think this would be a perfect computer for her, since all she does is use Facebook and other things that are on the web.

Hi Andy here jast to clarify wat is the situation in the cases? because i was going to use a dvd case style box to contain it as dust may make the ICB prone. so would like to know when or if a case is being released shortly after raspberry pi is released.
thank you in advance (even if the info is unhelpful) so anything on the matter is still worth knowing :)

At the date of launch, will people be able to buy it from a foreign country?
I mean: if I live in Brazil, can I buy a Raspberry Pi through the Internet, from your shop? Are you going to be able to ship it to my country?
Are you going to accept Paypal?

You can test some, or all, of the purchase process by going to the shop at http://www.raspberrypi.com. To do a complete test, you would have to spend some money on a sticker. You can test most of it for free, by stopping before you give your payment details.

I got my stickers, so I know it works to the US. I used paypal. On the day I placed my order, the exchange rate was such that it cost me $5.03 including shipping.

It isn’t quite a complete test, as they are just stickers. They’re sent as a letter, rather than as a parcel. It would have cost quite a bit more to do the test, if they had shipped the stickers in boxes.

Kudos to the people who checked the schematic and the board. No forgotten balls under the part, and no fatal mechanical interference between components, makes for a good prototype.

On my last project I forgot a ball under a 324 pin BGA. Something called ‘boot mode select’… Fortunately the paranoid* layout guy hadn’t culled the via for the pad, so a little scratching later and it lived.

I’m so excited for you guys. You’ve come such a long way and we’re so close to getting our grubby little paws on these things.

Just out of curiosity, do you think you will quickly sell out of them once they’re released or are you sending your orders straight to the factory? Because I know personally that I will buy at least 3 or 4 of your Model B’s.

[…] of first-edition hardware. The pre-production systems have a tiny circuit track modification after an error on the original schematic (which will be fixed for the first production run) and a large SD card slot held on by Araldite. […]

[…] of first-edition hardware. The pre-production systems have a tiny circuit track modification after an error on the original schematic (which will be fixed for the first production run) and a large SD card slot held on by Araldite. […]

[…] been put in at schematic level now, and won’t be present in the production boards.) You can read here about why we needed to make a change. The area being worked on is around a square mm (so a bit […]

[…] has been put in at schematic level now, and won’t be present in the production boards.) You can read here about why we needed to make a change. The area being worked on is around a square mm (so a bit […]

[…] has been put in at schematic level now, and won’t be present in the production boards.) You can read here about why we needed to make a change. The area being worked on is around a square mm (so a bit […]

I can’t wait for the first set of public release Pi’s come out! I’m gonna have to start pitching these to my school district because they spend A LOT of money on computers where it could be used to keep more teachers in jobs at the same time as filling up the computer labs.